A photo of Plaza de Bolivar in Bogota, Colombia found on http://mitupv.mit.edu/, a bilingual online community developed by 6.171 students Aimee Lee and Kathy Lee. (Image courtesy of Sandra Gaviria.)
Instructor(s)
Prof. Harold Abelson
Dr. Philip Greenspun
MIT Course Number
6.171
As Taught In
Fall 2003
Level
Undergraduate
Translated Versions
Course Description
Course Features
Course Highlights
The detailed syllabus includes a summary of the history and pedagogy of 6.171.
Course Description
6.171 is a course for students who already have some programming and software engineering experience. The goal is to give students some experience in dealing with those challenges that are unique to Internet applications, such as:
- concurrency;
- unpredictable load;
- security risks;
- opportunity for wide-area distributed computing;
- creating a reliable and stateful user experience on top of unreliable connections and stateless protocols;
- extreme requirements and absurd development schedules;
- requirements that change mid-way through a project, sometimes because of experience gained from testing with users;
- user demands for a multi-modal interface.